Modern Warfare 2 & Double Standards

So I guess some spoilers for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 got out. Big spoilers. The kind that make us gamers very, very upset. This post will discuss one of them: the one that’s been making the rounds today. To avoid Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 spoilers, stop reading now!

GamePolitics has the story about leaked game footage which appears to show a sequence in which the player guns down innocent civilians. Kotaku has confirmation from Activision that the leaked footage is indeed real, and that:

“The game includes a plot involving a mission carried out by a Russian villain who wants to trigger a global war. In order to defeat him, the player infiltrates his inner circle. The scene is designed to evoke the atrocities of terrorism.”

It seems that as the story makes the rounds, it’s not the mainstream media that’s upset by the violence this team (though they most certainly will be once they catch wind of it). No, in this case it seems to be the gaming community crying foul, and I find that rather curious.

GamePolitics pretty much sums up the argument:

What makes the footage so striking is the level of visuals in Modern Warfare 2, as even in blurry online footage the action looks almost real, taking this a level beyond the cartoonish violence of games such as Grand Theft Auto.

Wait… really? ‘Cause these still both look like video games to me:

Grand Theft Auto IV

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

And graphics whoring aside, isn’t this the same argument anti-game activists have been using for a decade now? We’ve always called out the media on their double standard, on the inherent absurdity of this idea that games can be “too realistic” but somehow films (live action!) cannot. And now, suddenly, we’re backpedaling?

Look: we all defended Grand Theft Auto IV, a game in which you mow down countless civilians. It’s a game so realistic, IGN’s Michael Tomsen commented:

It was a bad day personally, but I was unprepared for just how evocative and beautiful Rockstar’s fictional homage to New York City would be… I was inhabiting a world precariously close to a real place where a very specific person, whom I cared about a great deal, could actually be.

Kotaku’s Michael McWhertor agrees:

Rockstar has upped the ante, creating a startlingly realistic reinterpretation of New York City as backdrop to a violent crime epic.

Grand Theft Auto IV is a brutally violent game set in one of the most realistic depictions of the modern world to grace consoles this generation, and the gamer community welcomed it with open arms. Team Xbox even enthused:

But perhaps the biggest innovation is the notion that you can create a game that’s as valid a piece of art as any book or movie. Is this our “Citizen Kane” moment?

What is Modern Warfare 2 missing that Grand Theft Auto IV had? Why is Modern Warfare 2’s civilian-shooting being called out for going too far, while Grand Theft Auto IV’s civilian-shooting is our industry’s “Citizen Kane” moment? If this were your local TV news doing the freaking out, I could understand it. There, there’s precedent. But for gamers to espouse this obvious double standard is just retarded.

As noted in the Activision statement, “The scene is designed to evoke the atrocities of terrorism.” Hey, all you folks complaining that games need to grow up? This is part of that: games expressing ideas and making you feel things that you might find uncomfortable, forcing you to confront concepts and experiences you’d maybe rather not think about. If you think the scene is in poor taste, you can skip it: Activision has confirmed that. But if you want games to grow up, you need to grow up with them.

Hello Again, I Bring Gifts

Oh hey. I found a blog.

As some of you are aware, I recently completed a move from Salt Lake City, UT to Austin, TX along with my team at LightBox Interactive. That move, along with certain (NDA-protected) requirements of our current project, have taken up a great deal of my attention and energy. But I’m finally getting settled here in this most impressive city of Austin, and working my way back toward a regular schedule that includes, once again, some time for Third Helix.

A lot of people do the “I’m not dead” post as if it will single-handedly revive their ailing blog… and the internet collectively rolls its eyes and unsubscribes. Not so, today, for I bring gifts!

About three months ago, just before the Austin move, I undertook a 48-hour rapid prototyping project in Unity, producing a game called Tear Down This Wall. Via Twitter, I spammed the internets with ongoing project updates, kind of like a live development journal, and incorporated the feedback from the #teardownthiswall conversation back into the prototype. It was a fun experiment in game design that ultimately yielded a game I’m pretty proud of.

Well today, finally, I’ve properly published Tear Down This Wall, and you can go play it right now. Not only that, but I’ve also written up a development retrospective and posted each successive build from the beginning of the project to the end, so you can see, and experience, exactly how the game progressed from build to build. That’s all featured on the new Tear Down This Wall page.

Now go! Your cannon awaits!

Langdell, Bates Resign From IGDA Board

Little bit of a slow blogging spell, there. I’ve been wrapped up in moving (with LightBox) down to Texas. That’ll be why there haven’t been any Monday Musings for a few weeks, and so on. But now that I’ve landed and got internet access again, things should quickly start getting back to normal.

Anyway… did you hear Tim Langdell resigned from the IGDA board? It’s always nice waking up to good news. He says he did it to prevent his detractors from dragging IGDA through the mud. Whether that’s valid or not, the end result is that, finally, IGDA may stop getting dragged through the mud. (Of course, we also lost Bob Bates, and that’s a bit less good for us. Good luck in your future endeavours, Bob!)

And can someone explain to me why the hell IGDA is making announcements through its RSS feed via PDF? It’s just… weird.

[Monday Musings] Gameplay Isn’t Everything?

[Denis Dyack said recently that "gameplay isn't everything". This week's post explores that topic in detail, and attempts to clarify some ambiguities in game design terminology that I believe have contributed to some confusion over what Dyack is actually advocating.]

“Gameplay Isn’t Everything”

A few days ago, Gamasutra reported on comments by Denis Dyack (of Eternal Darkness and Too Human fame… or infamy, depending on your perspective) with respect to the relationship between gameplay and narrative:

“Gameplay is not everything,” said Silicon Knights (Eternal Darkness) founder and president Denis Dyack. “If you look at the most popular games today, they are far more narrative-focused. If games are to follow the trajectory of films, then the dominance of gameplay will diminish in place of an increased focus and importance on gaming’s stories and the ways in which they are told.”

I take issue with the suggestion that games ought to follow the trajectory of films, but I’ll reserve the industry’s film envy for a later post. Today I want to talk about this “gameplay isn’t everything” business. The first problem to address, however, is a semantic one: what exactly is meant by “gameplay”?

What Is Gameplay?

On some level, we all kind of “just know” what gameplay is. We know it when we experience it. But it’s a bit harder to really nail down, concretely, what defines it, what differentiates “gameplay” from “not gameplay”.

For purposes of this argument, I’ve chosen to define “competition” as the prime differentiator. If you have competition, you have gameplay; if not, you don’t. More specifically, the presence of competition distinguishes “games” from “experiences”.

Unfortunately, this creates another tricky clash of terms. We tend to use “game” colloquially to describe an entire spectrum of interactive experiences, from the abstract to the concrete, from the authored to the emergent. From here on out, I’ll use the term “video game” explicitly, to refer to any product of our medium. Within that spectrum, “game” describes a product which is built around competition, while “experience” describes a product which is not.

So then, why competition? For starters, note that I’m not exclusively referring to multiplayer. There exists a wealth of single-player games that are built around competition, usually (but not always) in the form of AI opponents. In any case, I started developing this line of reasoning after reading Jason Rohrer’s excellent article in The Escapist last August, Testing the Limits of Single-Player:

“The discussion of AI highlights that the human factor is not what allows simple game mechanics to blossom. It’s not what humans bring to the game, but what two competing players – human or not – bring that allows the beautiful complexity and subtlety to emerge… Go’s depth exists separate from the personalities that play it, like a property of the universe just waiting to be discovered whenever two entities sit down, in opposition, to explore it.”

In most cases, the opponent is concrete: the opposing players in Unreal Tournament, or the other civs in Civilization. Sometimes, the opponent is abstract: the obstacle-laden level designs of Portal, or the abandoned puzzle fixtures of Myst. In all cases, the opponent’s role is to prevent the player from winning the game. Player and opponent struggle against one another, forming a ludic narrative that lasts until victory or defeat is finally realized. This is the essence of gameplay.

What Isn’t Gameplay?

The defining characteristic of video games is interactivity. The defining characteristic of a “game” — in its specific definition as just described — is competition. But competition is not a prerequisite of interactivity, so it stands to reason that another kind of video game must exist, one in which competition is absent. I call this type of video game an “experience”.

Experiences, under this specific definition, do not have gameplay. But that doesn’t mean they’re not video games. Again, the defining characteristic of video games is interactivity, and experiences are fully interactive.

Experiences replace “competition” with “facilitation”. The game doesn’t work against the player, but rather works with the player to facilitate a particular experience. This might be the exploration of a fully-realized, authored storyline, or it might be an abstract realization of an emotional state or progression of states, or it might be anywhere in between.

Examples of experiences are somewhat rare. The Half Life 2 mod Dear Esther presents a linear progression through an environment coupled with a fractured progression through a narrated story, but with no challenge gates whatsoever. There is no opponent, either concrete or abstract. Independent developer Tale of Tales has focused on this kind of work: The Path is all about exploring an area in search of interesting tokens, but can in fact be “completed” by simply walking a straight line, unchallenged; The Graveyard is similar, involving the exploration of place and memory absent any opposition.

Is This All Just A Big Misunderstanding?

To return to Dyack’s assertion that “gameplay isn’t everything”: I’ve seen responses from the game design community run the gamut from enthusiastic agreement to vehement denial. My impression so far is that the response tends more toward the latter, and I’ll admit that was my knee-jerk reaction when I first read the article.

Further reflection, however, led me to differentiate “games” and “experiences” and to realize that both are fundamentally “video games”, as both share interactivity. And that, I think, cuts to the heart of Dyack’s point.

In my interpretation, Dyack is not advocating for experiences to replace games; he’s advocating for experiences to be recognized as being as valid as games. Pure experiences are rare right now, but they’re by no means unfulfilling. (Personally, Dear Esther is one of the most memorable video games I’ve played recently.)

So in the end, I agree with Denis Dyack, but with one little caveat. Gameplay isn’t everything… unless you’re making games.

(Also, our terms suck. We need more of this, please!)

Cultural Accuracy Is Not Racism

The ever-watchful GamePolitics drew my attention to an article posted Tuesday on the Houston Chronicle’s Game Hacks blog, in which the author asserts that, among other things, Left 4 Dead 2, Resident Evil 5, and Call of Juarez: Bound In Blood are racist video games.

I’m all for escaping reality in video games. I love turning into a Spartan, cruising space as Commander Shepard in “Mass Effect” and have fun as Niko in “Grand Theft Auto IV.” However, I am disturbed by the growing trend of racist undertones that are cropping up in video games.

One of the games that comes to mind is “Left 4 Dead 2.” Though the game isn’t out yet, it’s already causing an uproar. Set in New Orleans, players will have to fight their way through hordes of zombies – with several of them who appear to be African-Americans. When I saw the first trailer for the game, all I could think about was Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath… Another game, “Resident Evil 5,” puts gamers into the heart of Africa, blasting zombies. I bet you’ll never guess what color they are. [...]

The game that really inspired this blog entry was Ubisoft’s “Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood.” The game starts out with players assuming the role of Ray, a Confederate officer, working to save his brother, Thomas, who’s pinned down by Union soldiers. I nearly dropped the controller. I have so much respect for President Lincoln — he wanted to preserve the Union and ended up freeing the slaves — and have just as much respect for the Union Army.

However, the Confederacy, as far as I am concerned, wanted to keep their cheap slave labor and the like. I can not stand the Confederate flag — I resist the urge to burn every last one that I see.

Our concept of what is and isn’t racism has gotten way out of control. Not just because of this article: this is just one example in a sea of incidents.

Racism is a targeted expression of hate based solely on the victim’s ethnicity. The above-mentioned depictions of and references to race are clearly not expressions of hate. Left 4 Dead 2 has a lot of black zombies because it’s set in and around New Orleans, which just happens to have a sizable black population. Resident Evil 5 similarly features black zombies because, yeah, there’s black people in Africa too. (God, I can’t believe I even have to explicitly state this.) These two examples are no more racist than a WWII game’s depiction of white guys shooting at each other on Omaha Beach.

The Call of Juarez assertion is a little different, but at least as puzzling. The game’s story casts the player — for at least part of the time — in the role of a Confederate officer. And this is, apparently, a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad thing. Because… the author hates the Confederacy? Sounds pretty irrational to me, frankly. Again, this is a story set in a place and time where the Confederacy was active. It only makes sense that a Confederate soldier would be depicted as part of that story. What, are we supposed to just scrub out bits of history and pretend they never happened, just because someone might not like them?

It seems to me that it would be more insulting if we simply erased an entire ethnicity or social group from an area and/or time period in some misguided attempt to avoid offending them. As if their heritage is somehow not comfortable enough for us to talk about, that their stories are somehow not valid parts of our cultural discourse, so much so that to even refer to them is to cross a line.

Cultural accuracy is not racism. And if we ever want to expand the games industry beyond space marines and aliens and steel bikinis and adolescent white male power fantasies, we’re going to need to come to terms with that.

(P.S. The author asserts that Left 4 Dead 2 “is already causing an uproar”. Did I miss the uproar train? ‘Cause as far as I can tell, this is an uproar of one.)